Media law

The phrase that costs German newsrooms most is also a small grammar lesson: sich etwas zu eigen machen, to adopt someone else’s statement as your own. A paper that quotes an accusation and adopts it is treated as if it had made the accusation itself. The reflexive pronoun is in the dative and the thing adopted is in the accusative: Die Zeitung hat sich den Vorwurf zu eigen gemacht. Said of yourself it is ich mache mir das nicht zu eigen — mir, never mich, because the accusative slot is already taken by what is being adopted. And eigen stays in lower case: here it is an adjective, not a noun, so the capital that German gives every noun does not apply. The rest of this list is the machinery around that moment — who may demand what, how quickly, and who steht dafür gerade.